Plant & Haraway

How might the new media world have looked different had women, and particularly feminist women writers, been more prominent in theorizing the future during the decades of the 70s, 80s, and 90s?

Plant's essay uses Freud's thoughts on the contribution of women & weaving to society to reach her own conclusions on female import in technological advancement, "Freud pulls aside the veils, the webs of deception, the shrouds of mystery, and finds nothing there, only 'the horror of nothing to be seen.'" (Plant 256). Though I find diminishing a women's capability of changing the world into a simple contribution of weaving, Plant takes this argument in an interesting direction when she writes that the act of weaving, as well as the machine itself, initiated much technological change. Not only does weaving actually produce a useful and necessary product, she expounds on the social effects of this act, "Thus, a piece of cloth is saturated with the thoughts of the people who produced it, each of whom can see it and be transported to the state of mind in which they worked" (258). From Plant's work alone, I have difficulty answering the first prompt which asks how new media might have looked if women held a more prominent role in theorizing the future. She certainly suggests that women are capable of contributing to the technological world and that they have, in fact, led to many advances we have today. I'm not sure if Plant thinks the new media world would be different, her writing does suggest a social aspect of technological advancement absent in the male writers we've read thus far.

Haraway's work, "Simians, Cyborgs, and Women" begins with an introduction about cyborgs, "The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation" (150). I admit that I had difficulty understanding aspects of this piece, she seemed to focus quite a lot on boundaries and how new media might help to break or destroy these perhaps not inherent differences between machines, people, males, females, etc, "Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert" (152). Though this statement sounds rather cryptic and frightening, her piece does not exactly condemn the breaking of these boundaries. In fact, she goes on a bit about how women and feminists are forced into categories based on value and contributions and certainly does not seem content to blindly accept the roles that women have inhabited, even if these roles are as radical feminists. She writes,
"to be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labour force; seen less as workers than as servers..." (166). However, Haraway also doesn't seem to think the direction of new media is that favorable, maybe because the media and technology we have today are not changing any of these preconceived roles of feminism and women?